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Welcome to the Origins Portal!

So many of the issues and challenges we face today demand clear access to knowledge being developed at the forefront of science and technology. To solve global problems we need to understand and employ all the different tools available from a variety of disciplines.

The Origins Education Portal, an innovative, open-access resource archive, was designed to bring users exclusive intellectual content from our private academic workshops. Taking full advantage of the remarkable Origins Project workshops and to ensure their value lasts well into the future, we will continue to curate this dynamic and interactive global resource center.

Our first offering from the Origins Portal is the Origins of Violence: An Overview. The curated materials found in the Origins of Violence are informed and inspired by one of our high-level academic workshops held in April 2014. Led by Harvard Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, this workshop featured the world’s top scholars in deep discussion about the socio-cultural and neuro-biological forms of violence. Topics ranged from its evolutionary utility in primates and early humans to the success of nonviolent protests propelling wide scale social change.

The second interactive curated offering is the Origins of Extinctions, which gives a global audience direct access to videos from the provocative Origins Project academic workshop, Extinctions as Creative Destruction, held in February 2015. This workshop broadly explored extinctions, ranging from planetary extinction events, to biological and species extinction, followed by cultural extinction events, and finally extinctions in the technological world. Within this Education Portal offering, the Origins Project explores the nature of extinction and the future of both our species and the Earth’s biosphere, and asks whether, and to what extent, extinction is required for progress, and what we can do to preserve existing biodiversity on our planet.